Dear Bureaucrat, I’m being micromanaged!

Dear Bureaucrat,

My boss insists on checking over any work I do before it goes to anybody outside our division. When he makes changes, they aren’t really improvements. I don’t think he’s trying to claim credit for my work, because he lets me send it under my name after I put in his changes. But I feel belittled, the needless review creates extra work and delay, and people think I’m late doing my part of projects, when the real problem is it’s waiting for my boss to check. How can I get him to be less controlling?

Signed,
Hobbled

Dear Hobbled,

One approach is to discuss your feelings frankly with your boss. Don’t do it! Because your frank feelings are, “Your unwillingness to delegate to me is a personality flaw, or at least a lack of management skill.” That won’t help, and is probably a misdiagnosis.

Professor Carrie Leana researched the factors that predict whether a supervisor requires an employee’s work to get his approval before it goes out, or delegates to the employee. She found that differences among supervisors, in their need for dominance and their opinions about the proper role of supervisors, did not predict how much they delegated. But a supervisor’s perceptions of any particular employee’s capability, responsibility and trustworthiness was a relatively strong predictor of how much he would delegate to that employee. Interestingly, there was no significant relationship between a supervisor’s perceptions of a particular employee and objective measures of the employee’s job performance.